Some more thoughts I have been having about what Radio can learn from podcasts.

One thing I find useful about podcasts are their show notes. These are often links directly to the stories and/or website mentioned, equipment talked about and sponsors of that podcast plus a rundown of topics is sometimes included. The big benefit of this is whilst the show is on I am often walking to/from work and don’t have a means of writing things down but I don’t have to – often the links are “in the show notes”.

Now I am thinking primarily of BBC Local Radio here but commercial radio could use it with their sponsors to help engagement. Wouldn’t it be much better for them on air instead of reading out website addresses they just say “for the website links head to the programme page on our website”. This doesn’t need to be confined to website links as it can contain contact details and more specific details of requests/appeals plus a photo or two. BBC Local is tending to rely on Facebook to give this info and added edge simply because it is simpler to achieve. I shall simpler to achieve as I believe the ‘ibroadcast’ system is capable to adding notes to show (let me know in the comments if this is true)

These show notes could also have timecode in them allowing the listener to be able to jump to that particular point when the interview begun. I often see tweets from presenters saying “Great having x on the show today – listen again on the iPlayer (scroll to 47:30 in)” or those tweets come from guests on the show. This would enable more SEO for the BBC Website plus those appearing and enable better sharing of content via social media. It would also help if in the future you wanted to ‘atomise’ the content and use it in a similar way to the way NPR do for their NPR One App.

Podcasts can do it. Here for example I will link to the in point in my podcast, Desert Island Geek, where I spoke to Christian Payne AKA @documentally about how he ended up being a sheep farmer for 6 years. I can then link or embed the player to an earlier part of that same podcast where he spoke about his book choice to read during his time on the island.

Along similiar lines the URLs of the individual shows should be improved to be, for example, www.bbc.co.uk/essex/monk should get me to the Dave Monk show on BBC Essex and his latest programme should be front and centre with listen live if he happens to be on air at the time.